From Bolívar to Super Bowl: why Gustavo Dudamel is reaching out to the world

‘The Dude’, the conductor of the LA Phil, is to bring the spirit of music-making in Venezuela to the poorest kids of LA, but how will he complete his mission of reaching the ‘99% untouched by classical music’?

‘When you are very young, you don’t have limits. But as you get older, you start to balance things’... Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

This could be called “Waiting for Gustavo”. I am in Los Angeles for a series of concerts conducted by the great (and still absurdly young) man, and we will meet. But when? It is not quite clear. He is rehearsing; dining with pianist Sergio Tiempo, who is playing Ginastera’s dramatic First Piano Concerto in one of the concerts; driving from his home in central LA to the orchestra’s striking, stainless steel, Frank Gehry-designed concert hall downtown. We will meet eventually, but this is going to take a while.

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Dudamel – “the Dude”, as he is affectionately, even reverently known in LA – is the best-known conductor in the world. Supporters of Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim might contest that claim, but can you imagine either of them appearing with Coldplay at the Super Bowl half-time concert, as Dudamel – a close chum of the band’s lead singer Chris Martin – did this year? He also inspired the character of Rodrigo in Amazon’s hit TV series Mozart in the Jungle – some of the cast are at one of the concerts I attend, but they are lost in the scrum. Rodrigo, the small, outré Mexican music director of a mythical orchestra called the New York Symphony that seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to the LA Phil, is based on Dudamel. Happily, the Dude is in on the joke: he coached actor, and his TV alter ego, Gael García Bernal in the art of conducting and even had a walk-on part as a stagehand in one episode. According to Mark Newbanks, Dudamel’s London-based manager, his mission in life is to reach the 99% of the population currently untouched by classical music – hence the soap opera and Super Bowl appearance.

The key to Dudamel’s rockstar appeal is his backstory: born into a Venezuelan family – father a trombonist in a salsa band, mother a singing teacher – which he describes as “humble”; came up through the country’s fabled El Sistema programme which claims to have 800,000 children, many from poor backgrounds, learning music; conductor of the system’s Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra in his teens; came from nowhere to win the Gustav Mahler conducting competition in Germany in 2004; conducted his young compatriots in what the Daily Telegraph mooted as “the greatest Prom of all time” in 2007; took up his post as music director in LA in 2009; also conducts the Vienna Phil – he will conduct their New Year’s Day concert (the youngest ever to do it) in 2017 – and the Berlin Phil; has already conducted at La Scala and in 2018 will make his debut at the Met in New York. He is only 35. This is a classical career like no other.

What Dudamel is famous for in Venezuela – the musical education of that increasingly benighted country’s youth – he is now spearheading in LA. Dudamel was at the Super Bowl with dozens of students from Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (Yola), and he’ll be bringing 10 of them to London next week when the LA Phil have a three-day residency at the Barbican, which will include an open rehearsal when the Yola contingent will play alongside young musicians from east London.

Dudamel – eager, open, charismatic – is in his element when faced with such wide-eyed enthusiasm. Professional orchestras do not, though, necessarily tend to exhibit such traits. How do they find their young maestro? Like Rodrigo in Mozart in the Jungle, Dudamel is rumoured to be big on love. Tom Hooten, principal trumpet with the LA Phil, tells me the Dude is always saying “let’s have fun”. Hooten, by his own admission a worrier and a seeker after technical perfection, was amazed. “It was hard to accept that because you didn’t think those two things [fun and technical perfection] were congruent.”

Richard Elegino, who has played the viola in the orchestra since 1980, says Dudamel “makes the orchestra sing”. The great Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini was music director when the Japanese-born Elegino joined the LA Phil, and he says it is like coming full circle. “Giulini and Gustavo are very similar,” he says. “They want the orchestra to sing from the heart.” It is why Dudamel excels in the great romantic repertoire – and perhaps why some critics dismiss his approach as unduly heart-on-sleeve.

“Everything is overegged,” one UK critic tells me when I get back to London. “He is very good at pieces that demand intense colour, but when he does Schumann or Haydn he tends to over-interpret.” Mark Swed, the classical music critic at the LA Times, is more positive. “The most surprising thing about him is his enormous curiosity,” he says. “My feeling is you want to give him all the freedom in the world. I want to see him make mistakes and try crazy things and get it wrong, because if he learns from that and grows then something amazing will happen. And if he doesn’t and he becomes a cliche of himself, then he dies and that’s that.”

After a three-day overture, the waiting is over. Dudamel has some time in his dressing room before he has to shower for the 8pm concert. He sits close to me, wearing little round spectacles I haven’t seen before – he certainly doesn’t conduct in them. He is warm, friendly and keen on soliloquies about the glories of El Sistema, though avoids mentioning the criticism it has faced. In 2014 UK-based musicologist Geoff Baker published a book called Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth, attacking the system as authoritarian, conservative and limited in its social impact. A noisy battle between the pros and the antis has raged ever since.

Dudamel’s position has also been undermined by the spiralling economic decline and political unrest in Venezuela, and his perceived closeness to the leftwing governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, a stance that does not go down well even in liberal Los Angeles. Throw in the Dude’s separation from his wife Eloísa Maturén last year – the couple have joint custody of their four-year-old son – and it is a potent cocktail for a pre-shower chat.

Hugo Chávez with Gustavo Dudamel after a concert with the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in 2011. Photograph: AP

I ask him whether he could ever have imagined his career developing so rapidly. “Everything has been very natural,” he says. “I have been conducting since I was 11. We are talking about 24 years, doing this every day, having music as the main thing in my life. I was not looking for this [the job at the LA Phil]; I was looking to make good music and to have great relations with the people I work with. I am very privileged: I conduct in Vienna, Berlin, La Scala; I have this great orchestra, this great institution; I have my other family, which is the Simón Bolívar orchestra, plus Sistema, which is a universe. It’s like a gift, and all thanks to Sistema and Maestro [José Antonio] Abreu [the Venezuelan founder of El Sistema].”

Abreu, who is now 76 and in poor health, chose Dudamel to head the Simón Bolívar orchestra, and the Dude cites him constantly, describing him at one point as “the greatest musician I have ever met”. His continuing commitment to the system and to his country is in part born of personal loyalty, and the only testy part of our encounter comes when I mention Baker’s book. “I haven’t read it,” he says. I paraphrase the key points of Baker’s argument – that it’s mainly middle-class children who benefit and the style of teaching is old-fashioned and dogmatic. “My dear friend,” he says with nice irony, “I lived Sistema; I was one of the children of Sistema; a book will not tell me the reality of what I was living.” He insists it will survive whatever happens in Venezuela. “The Sistema is a cultural symbol of our country, and everybody feels proud of it. Of course in critical moments people feel that everything shakes, but Sistema is very solid.”

Dudamel says he spends almost half his time in Venezuela. Some wondered whether, as his international career exploded, he would abandon his native country, but he shows no desire to do so. “I have never been disconnected from Sistema, even in the most difficult moments. It’s my family and they are my children. I was one of them.” Does maintaining a busy international schedule while helping keep Sistema afloat risk burnout? “I know my limits,” he says. “. Everybody sees my international career, but they don’t see me at my office in Caracas, working quietly. For me to work there is not a responsibility; it’s a gift.”

He still conducts and tours with the Simón Bolívar orchestra, though these days, as they all get older, they have dropped the “youth” part of the name and present themselves as a fully-fledged symphony orchestra (a problem for them, say critics, as they are not yet ready to be compared with the great international orchestras). Is he a different person when he is conducting the home-grown talents he has nurtured over two decades and the hard-nosed pros at the LA Phil? “No, I am the same,” he says. “They [the Simón Bolívar orchestra] come here a lot for residencies, and I’m sure since the Los Angeles Philharmonic played with the Bolívars they’ve changed. The same for the Bolívars – the spirit, the approach, the whole atmosphere. That is very important. In our world there is a lot of routine. It’s normal: you are playing the same music, sometimes for the same audience. But I hate routine. I hate to do the same. Music has to have magic inside it.”

From the musicians in the LA Phil, I get the sense that energy and spontaneity – “being in the moment”, as one puts it – mean more to Dudamel than technical perfection. “Let’s talk about perfection as a concept,” he says. “It doesn’t exist. Even nature, which is wonderful, is not perfect. This is a live performance; it’s not a movie; it’s not a painting that will be there forever and you cannot change anything. Live performance happens like that.” He clicks his fingers. “In a live performance a mistake is seconds, like three seconds in a symphony that lasts an hour.” The spirit is everything, he says, and if you fear making a mistake you will never be free.

All conductors say they change things from rehearsal to concert, but in Dudamel’s case it is true. Most of the programmes in LA are given four times, and Dudamel’s speeds differ markedly from concert to concert. At one performance I sit next to Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the newly appointed music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and assistant conductor in LA, and she points out details that have changed since the preceding concert – she attends all the concerts in case Dudamel falls off the podium and she has to take over.

Gražinytė-Tyla tells me later that Dudamel is “an animal on stage, always concerned with doing music very immediately”. She says “his gift of communicating things in the moment is incredible”, and that even his rehearsals have the intensity of concerts. “If it’s a repertoire piece, he will try to do it always in a different way.” She also makes the point that his outwardness and visceral energy on stage contrast with his relatively withdrawn personality. “In casual life, he is somehow closed and in himself. I guess that this is a certain state that he needs to carry this whole psychological and emotional baggage.” He is, she suggests, husbanding his resources: taking everything in but not giving too much away; saving his energy for when he needs to unleash it on the podium.

A music director has to be two different people: frontman for the orchestra and intense student of the scores he will be conducting. It is an odd combination of PR man and monk, but Dudamel insists he does not find it incongruous. “I was in my studio today reading some Messiaen” – he will be conducting the monumental From the Canyons to the Stars for the first time as part of the Barbican residency. “Very difficult piece, wow, but beautiful.” When I’m reading a score I take a book and relax. I love to play with my brain, and Messiaen offers a universe of possibilities. There are many technical things to solve there, but the key is the colours. Composers give to you dynamics, but it all depends on the context, and this is what I try to discover. Which colour do you prefer to bring? It’s like when you are cooking. A little bit more salt here will make the interpretation different.

Dudamel says he inherited a very “elegant” orchestra from his predecessor Esa-Pekka Salonen, but is trying to instil more fire into their playing. “Sometimes I love that elegance to be a little bit stormy.” He pleads guilty to emotionalism, and says if critics dislike it, tough. “I cannot do it another way. Imagine this: that one day I read all the critics and I want to make happy all of them. I would be not honest. It will not be me. It will be them. I say the things in the way that I know.”

Does it bother him that critics give him a harder time than they used to when he was a brash up-and-comer from South America? “Criticism is very subjective,” he says. “I have to do the things that I do in the way that I think, because I am the one sharing a musical idea with the orchestra. The orchestra trust me, but I also trust them. I always say that this is a 50‑50 interaction. I am very critical with myself, but in the end I don’t kill myself. I know that this concert is a moment.”

If I read all the critics and wanted to make them all happy it wouldn’t be me: I say things in the way that I know

Is he a different conductor now from the one he was 10 years ago? “I’m the same, but with more experience and a deeper way to think about what I do.” His repertoire is already wide, but he says he hopes soon to do more Bruckner, perhaps a complete cycle of the symphonies, and the operas of Wagner. He is studying German so he can understand the texts before he tackles them.

His friend Rattle suggested a couple of years ago that Dudamel should take time out to get more experience away from music, but that looks unlikely. Newbanks says the Dude works between 40 and 45 weeks a year, is selective about where he conducts, and does not consider himself overworked. Rattle implied that tackling musical Everests was best left to mature conductors, but Dudamel reckons you can attempt them at any age, as long as each time you do it you look for a new route up. He recalls working on Mahler’s Third Symphony with Claudio Abbado in Venezuela. “It was a work he had recorded many times, but he was still studying as if it was the first time. His eyes were as if he was a child. We are always searching. This is a profession and a life in which you always feel young.”

Dudamel says he has no idea where his career is ultimately heading. A friend tells me later he was badly affected by his separation from his wife. Dudamel talks about his son, on whom he dotes, and the way that becoming a father had made him see the world anew.

He tells me that recently he went to a concert in a little town called Upata, in the northwest of Venezuela. “The youth orchestra was playing the New World Symphony. I was coming from a tour with the Vienna Philharmonic where we had done the same symphony. You know, for me the best interpretation that I heard was the one in Upata, because it was so honest, because there was no routine. I always say to [professional] musicians I work with, “Remember the day that you found this was your life, when you decided that you were a musician. We have to remember that. When we work together, I think most of them do remember.” And with that, he is gone – to shower, conduct, mine new musical meanings. He says we will talk some more at the interval, but of course we never do. By then, lots of other people want a piece of the Dude.

• Gustavo Dudamel will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in three concerts at the Barbican, London EC2, on 22, 23 and 24 March. www.barbican.org.uk

As Venezuela struggles with a crippling financial crisis and extreme food shortages, some believe the contentious social and classical music programme is needed more than ever to give hope to the poorest communities